MISS HENNINGS TEACHES

In November 2017, I had the opportunity to teach the digital citizenship lesson I created to roughly sixty seniors at my local high school in Wheatfield, Indiana. In early November, I reached out to my high school AP English Literature teacher to inquire about the possibility of me guest teaching in her classroom. To my pleasure, she responded immediately with enthusiasm and great anticipation! She told me excitedly that her AP English students would be in the middle of reading Brave New World that week, so my lesson on the importance of identifying “fake” news would be a perfect fit.

 

In the days leading up to my lesson implementation, I was faced with the task of adapting my current digital citizenship lesson materials for high-ability twelfth-graders (as the lesson was initially created for sixth-graders). I also wanted to make direct and distinct correlations between the digital citizenship content and Brave New World, since the novel so clearly represents the negative repercussions of “fake” news and the mindless consumption of information. However, this proved to be more time-consuming and tedious than I anticipated, because it was virtually a complete overhaul of my previous lesson activities. Nevertheless, I succeeded in adjusting my materials and felt confident that they were age appropriate.

 

On the day of my lesson implementation, I was extremely anxious, both because I would be teaching students who knew me well and because I did not want to disappoint my old teacher (with whom I am still very close). I was afraid that, because several of the students were familiar with me, they would not respect me as the teacher for the day and, as a result, my lesson would be unsuccessful. I also wanted very badly to remain strictly professional, as I am gradually trying to transition from ‘former student’ to ‘potential colleague’ in the eyes of the school staff. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions I received from both the teacher and the students.

 

As the first group trickled into the classroom after just finishing lunch, I was almost instantly surrounded by swarms of students; it certainly did not take long for them to recognize me! They greeted me excitedly and immediately asked why I was visiting the class. As I explained my purpose for returning to the school, they seemed to automatically address me as a professional, not a friend, which I had not anticipated. Indeed, throughout the entire lesson they awarded me the same degree of attentiveness and respect that they usually give to their actual teacher. To me, this was fascinating.

 

When the bell finally rung and it was time to begin, I started by providing some background information about myself and my purpose for visiting their class, making sure to express my gratitude to the teacher for allowing me to teach her students. I then introduced the concepts of “fake” news and information literacy and asked the students to consider why being able to identify “fake” news is an important skill to possess. I reviewed two separate “fake” news stories with them, which illustrated their potentially severe repercussions. We then watched a TED-Ed video on “How to Choose Your News.” This video does a fantastic job of explaining the tumultuous history of the media and provides several ways to ensure that the news you receive is accurate and trustworthy. After this, I finally introduced the connections to Brave New World and Aldous Huxley’s fears about mindless media consumption, which prompted him to write the novel. I reiterated the importance of being able to distinguish between “fake” news and “real” news and subsequently provided the students with ten main strategies to help them make this distinction on their own. After reviewing these strategies, the students were asked to test their own abilities to identify “fake” news by playing an online game (which was created by college students at the American University for this purpose).  Lastly, we concluded with a debrief of the activity and a discussion on the ‘Brave New World’ Huxley created in his book. I posed this final question to them: “Based on the prevalence of the mindless consumption of information in our modern society, do you think we have become the ‘Brave New World’ that Huxley so greatly feared?” At their tables, the students debated this question for 3-4 minutes before rejoining the larger group to share their opinions. This was, for me, the most exciting and rewarding part of the lesson, because the students were so actively participating and vehemently arguing their own positions. It was incredible to see them so engaged and thoughtfully considering the work of literature that they were reading! Although I was initially dreading having to teach this lesson (out of nerves), by the end, I was actually disappointed that it was over. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching these students and was really impressed by their level of engagement.

 

It was fairly easy for me to integrate technology into my lesson because my high school is 1:1, meaning every student has their own school-issued Chromebook and every classroom has a Promethean board. Because of this, I created a Nearpod presentation so that the students could follow along with my lesson on their own devices. However, the students had never used this program before, so they seemed a little hesitant to join it (and frankly even a little unimpressed by it). Recognizing that this was more of a hassle to include than anything, I did not ask the second class to join the Nearpod and instead presented the Google Slides version. (This ended up working better anyway because the links to my videos did not work in the Nearpod version!). However, the students still used technology by participating in the online game on their Chromebooks.

 

In the end, I was grateful to have two opportunities, back-to-back, to teach this lesson, because it allowed me to analyze what did not work well with first group and then make adjustments for the second group. For example, I asked the first class to participate in the online game by working with their small groups to identify which news articles were “fake.” However, when left on their own, many students did not collaborate with their peers and instead sat quietly, seemingly unengaged. To fix this issue, during the second lesson I went through several of the articles from the game on the Promethean board with the whole class, asking for volunteers to explain whether or not the article was “real” or “fake” and identify why. This approach worked much better! The students were more willing to participate and often disagreed about the answer, which prompted great discussion about each of the articles and the different ways to distinguish “fake” news from “real” news. What I really learned was that every group of students is different, and while small group learning and individual device-use worked best with the sixth-graders, the twelfth-graders responded in an entirely different manner to this arrangement. This demonstrates how vastly different the integration of technology can look in a classroom.

 

Overall, I was very pleased with the outcome and am happy to have had this opportunity. I am also very grateful that the teacher gave me full control of her classroom (even allowing me to answer the door when someone knocked!). She did not even sit at her desk, opting instead to join a table of students and participate in the lesson as one of them. I believe that this demonstrates her complete trust in me as a teacher, which was incredibly humbling and reassuring. I am truly honored to have been invited into her classroom and will cherish this experience!